Tuesday, July 27, 2004

Africa - A scar on the conscience of the world

Three years ago, British Prime Minister Tony Blair appealed to the world to heal the wounds of Africa. As Foreign Secretary Jack Straw prepares to fly to the Sudan tomorrow, the continent is still riven by strife, war and famine.

"The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don't, it will become deeper and angrier" - Tony Blair, 2 October 2001.

IVORY COAST: REBELLION

What is going on?The country, which produces 40 per cent of the world's cocoa, is effectively split between north and south following a rebellion two years ago by Muslim northerners over national identity and land ownership.

What is Britain doing to help? Britain is taking a low profile with no direct aid. The African Union, is attempting to organize elections in October to end the standoff.

What is the solution?No signs of early resolution to stalemate

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: WAR

What is going on?Sporadic fighting continues despite 2002 peace agreement. Congolese Tutsi rebel soldiers occupied eastern town of Bukavu for a week in June

What is Britain doing to help?Britain backs the UN peacekeeping mission and is also pressing Uganda and Rwanda to end any involvement, which they deny

What is the solution?Conflict expected to continue

ZIMBABWE: TYRANNY/FAMINE

What is going on?Political crackdown continues ahead of elections next year

What is Britain doing to help?Britain hopes South Africa will intercede with President Mugabe to resolve standoff

What is the solution?Stalemate will only be removed when Mugabe leaves power - quietly, it is hoped

SUDAN: ETHNIC CLEANSING/FAMINE

What is going on?Rebellion in Darfur provoked government crackdown leaving 1.2 million homeless and 50,000 dead

What is Britain doing to help?Largest single cash donor having provided £63m in humanitarian aid. Backs African Union efforts and UN

What is the solution? No easy answer. Sanctions could prove disastrous

UGANDA: REBELLION/AIDS

What is going on?Mystical Lord's Resistance army has terrorised northern Uganda for years with vicious campaign that has forced 1.5 million people from their homes

What is Britain doing to help?Britain has supported President Museveni with £740m in development aid since he came to power

What is the solution?Negotiations with Sudan-based leader Joseph Kony doomed to failure, miltary solution seems inevitable

RWANDA: ETHNIC STRIFE

What is going on?Rwanda continues to deny Congolese accusations that it has its soldiers in Congo in violation of a peace agreement. Ethnic tensions in Rwanda still strong after 1994 genocide.

What is Britain doing to help?UK is largest single donor, providing nearly £33m last year. But government rejects calls to use aid to pressure President Kagame

What is the solution?Peace in Rwanda depends on solution for Congo

BURUNDI: CIVIL WAR

What is going on?160 Tutsis were the victims last week of low level civil war

What is Britain doing to help?Britain is stepping up aid with £8m budgeted for 2004-5. UN just set up political mission

What is the solution?Solution depends on settlement in DR Congo
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On the trail of the killers who harvest child body parts for muti medicine

They first hit 10-year-old Sello Chokoe with a blunt instrument, causing a gash on his head. They then chopped off his penis, his hand and his ear. They were harvesting his body parts for "muti" - the murderous practice of traditional African medicine

Yet it is far from a normal part of such medicine. "In my many years of service in the South African police, I have not encountered this sadistic taking of a young innocent life," said police inspector Mohlahla Moshane as he led us to the spot.

The murder site is a few kilometres away from Sello's village, Moletjie, in northern Limpopo province. There stands a distinct and lonely hill in a vast grass and shrub veld.

The unsuspecting Sello was lured to the spot after being asked to look for a neighbour's donkeys. After a carefully planned ambush, his killers wedged him between the two large rocks to performed their macabre ceremony.

Sello seems to have dragged himself from the rocks where he had been abandoned. A woman collecting firewood found him and he was taken to hospital, but died a few days later. He was buried last Sunday in his fear-wracked village.

The practice of muti provides a disconcerting counterpoint to the contemporary image of the new South Africa. Dr Gerard Lubschagne, who heads the investigative psychology unit of the South African police service, conservatively estimates lives lost to ritual murders at between 50 to 300 every year. "We don't have accurate figures because most murders here are recorded in our records as murders irrespective of motive," he says. "Most people might also not regard a murder as a muti matter but just dismiss it as the work of some crazy killers."

Dr Lubschagne admits the rate of murders signals a very worrying trend in South Africa. Despite South Africa being the most developed African economy, a huge chunk of its population still believes power and wealth are better stoked by witch-doctors than stockbrokers and market analysts. "People who want to do better, people who want to be promoted at work, gamblers and politicians who want to win and even bank robbers who seek to get away with their criminal acts turn to muti," Dr Lubschagne said.

How the body parts are used varies with what customers want to achieve. They are eaten, drunk or smeared over the ambitious person. Various parts are used for different purposes. A man who had difficulty in producing children killed a father of several children and used his victim's genitals for muti. In another case, a butcher used a severed human hand to slap each of his products every morning before opening as a way of invoking the spirits to beckon customers.

Mathews Mojela is the head teacher at Sello's primary school. He has worked in rural areas for nearly a quarter of a century and says muti is founded in the archaic belief that there is only a limited amount of good luck around. If one wants to increase his wealth or luck, then it should come at another's expense.

The screaming of a child while his body parts are being chopped off is also regarded as a sign calling customers to the perpetrator's business, Mr Mojolela said. It is also believed that magical powers are awakened by the screams. Eating or burying the body parts "capture" the desired results. Robert Thornton, an anthropology professor at the University of Witswatersrand in Johannesburg , who has done research in traditional healing, says children like Sello are targeted because it is believed that the power of the virgin is greater than that of a sexually active adult.

The main motivating idea is what Professor Thorntorn describes as "symbolic logic", the idea that another person's penis will strengthen the perpetrator's, or that the perpetrator's far-sightedness will be improved by devouring the victim's eyes. Blood is thought to increase vitality.

Professor Issack Niehaus of the University of Pretoria fears that muti killings will increase as the inequalities of wealth become more entrenched. He said: "I would expect the occult economy - that is the belief in using magical means to gain prosperity - to increase as poverty worsens."

At the spot where Sello was murdered, Inspector Mashane said "A young kid is carefully lured into this bush and mutilated without any witnesses. If he survives, perhaps he is the only person who could help identify his killers."

One of the few victims who lived to tell his story was Jeffery Mkhonto, who six years ago was mutilated by an organised gang set to harvest body parts. He had been lured to the house of a neighbour for food and ended up being castrated.

Dr Lubschagne says muti killings are difficult to investigate because there is no clear relationship between perpetrator and victim. Yet other reports have also suggested that the muti victim is often known to the perpetrators and is easily lured and murdered in the process. Communities themselves are often too afraid to come forward with evidence because of fears of a magical retaliation.

At Sello's homestead, even the elders were too afraid to point any fingers directly at a neighbour, a traditional healer, although many villagers implicated him in Sello's murder in muffled tones. The neighbour had allegedly sent Sello to fetch his donkeys without Sello's mother's permission. Peter Kagbi, who is in his late sixties, was questioned for four days by the police over Sello's murder before being released pending further investigations. Mr Kgabi confirmed that he had sent Sello to fetch the donkeys, but he denied taking part in the murder.

He said he saw nothing wrong in sending Sello without the mother's permission as he had done that on similar errands before, a point hotly disputed by the boy's family. Mr Kgabi said he had been threatened by the community and told they planned to burn him alive because he was a wizard.

"Some are accusing me of killing Sello but I did not," he said. "I have not fled my home despite the threats because if I do, the community will regard that as an admission of guilt."

Even the eventual capture and conviction of Sello's killers would do little for his brokenhearted single mother, Salome, 39, who lives with her two remaining children on a £15 a month social grant from the government.

"Anything that does not bring back my son is hardly of any importance to me now. No mother wants to lose a child this way," she said.

Her emotional state will not be helped when she learns that Sello's body parts probably were sold for no more than £200 each, the price normally charged for a child's body parts in the muti industry.

3 Comments:

Hi, Ingrid. Good luck on starting this new blog. If it is only half as interesting and vibrant as "ME and Ophelia" then it will be terrific. Re the posting of comments. The fact that anonymous comments are not allowed may be problematic, since as I understand it one has to have a Blogger profile before one can comment. Some people do not wish to leave their identity open to abuse by spammers. I dunno if you can enable Anonymous comments or not.

Hi Aussie John, lovely surprise, thanks for the kind words and good luck. Patrick here must have seen your comment because he emailed me on how to adjust the commenting facility so anyone can comment and he kindly offered to do any tweaking I needed so I can concentrate on blogging. I wouldn't have known about the anon drawback, thanks. Your comment is too nice to delete so I guess this post stays where it is :)

Heh. Hey Kikoemasu, ka what ... Yes this thing is on - thanks to you I got email notification of your comment (but not John's, so your instructions also helped me to get that service activated). I don't know what's going on in the sidebar. After I keyed you in as a member (it looked like Blogger sent an auto message to your gmail) to enable you to tweak the links in the sidebar, my name and location and profile disappeared and were replaced by "contributors" - with your name and mine making it look like some sort of group blog. Sorry Patrick, I had no idea it would do that. I'll fix it later when the links are listed properly.